Yeah that's the GTO2 right down to the heatsink..... I've heard the GTO2 referred to as Fireblade so my guess is there will be confusion over this. Nice price for directron but sometimes they charge a bunch for shipping.

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HKEPC has a review up on the HIS Radeon X800 GTO and this card uses R480 core and 1.6ns Samsung memories. However, this card cannot be unlocked from 12 to 16 pipelines using the BIOS flashing method and sadly most X800 GTO cards that are hitting the retail now cannot be unlocked. So far only Sapphire X800GTO cards like the Ultimate and Fireblade editions using the X800 GTO² (R480) core can be successfully unlocked and from what we heard, X800 GTO² is only made exclusively for Sapphire. Don't rush out and grab a X800 GTO card because most likely you can't unlocked it. ATi has changed method of identifying and locking from 2ID to 4ID so it will be more difficult to alter the BIOS or perform hard mod.

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If I try to go for 540 core, the computer locks up and artifacts and I have to restart. Is this a bad card? I didn't try any benchmarking at the 540 speed. It just locked up after a few seconds. Still was idleing 44c-45c.

I could RMA this one and order another one. I want to make sure I get a good one for this price because this is what's going to have to last me till next year.

Wow.......won't even bench at 507... locks up my computer.... the mouse can move for a few seconds...then pc beeps and I have to restart it.

If I try to go for 540 core, the computer locks up and artifacts and I have to restart. Is this a bad card? I didn't try any benchmarking at the 540 speed. It just locked up after a few seconds. Still was idleing 44c-45c.

I could RMA this one and order another one. I want to make sure I get a good one for this price because this is what's going to have to last me till next year.

Wow.......won't even bench at 507... locks up my computer.... the mouse can move for a few seconds...then pc beeps and I have to restart it.

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Anyone know the max you can overclock the gto2 to with stock cooling? I don't want to overdo it and fry the card. I just want it reasonable.. but if not I might have to go with a Zalman VF700-CU. I'd rather not buy a new GPU cooler right now.. but I do want to OC it to a reasonable point. Thanks

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Anyone know the max you can overclock the gto2 to with stock cooling? I don't want to overdo it and fry the card. I just want it reasonable.. but if not I might have to go with a Zalman VF700-CU. I'd rather not buy a new GPU cooler right now.. but I do want to OC it to a reasonable point. Thanks

To do that, you need atiflash 3.09, not the modified flashrom. It is available at the bottom of the bios downloads page on this site. It is better than the modified flashrom. You just use the -newbios option when you want to change the number of pipelines when flashing the bios and don't use that option when you don't want the pipelines to change.

I read about this method somewhere and I used it on my X800 GT to attempt to unlock the pipelines, but it didn't work. I read this article about unlocking the pipelines on a GTO2 and decided to get one, but I only used the information about that it can be done, not how to do it. I just decided to use the method that I already knew of, which is what I just mentioned above, and it worked perfectly. I have 16 pipelines, but still using the original bios (with the exception of the pipeline change).

W1zzard, you should add the atiflash 3.09 with -newbios method to the guide, so that users of other X800 GTO cards will know how to attempt unlocking the pipelines if they want to. This question seems to keep coming up in here.

Anyone know the max you can overclock the gto2 to with stock cooling? I don't want to overdo it and fry the card. I just want it reasonable.. but if not I might have to go with a Zalman VF700-CU. I'd rather not buy a new GPU cooler right now.. but I do want to OC it to a reasonable point. Thanks

Mine went up to about 530/600 with the stock cooling. Ironically my clocks didn't go much higher with my silencer but the temps went down. I think I have a weak card. I've seen other people with much higher clocks still on stock cooling.

The -newbios option will not work with atiflash versions below 3.x and will not work with any version of flashrom.

Note: In Windows make sure you give the bios file a name 8 characters or shorter before the .bin or .rom, so that you can use it properly in DOS.

If your pixel pipelines are unlockable with only flashing the bios, that will do it. When using another card's bios, you risk having it not work because of an incompatible bios, but this way you still use your same bios, except with 16 pipelines enabled. If it is successful at unlocking them, the only thing that could go wrong is that the unlocked pipelines are defective. BTW, this is equivalent to using the modified flashrom to flash the bios then using the normal flashrom program to flash back your original bios, but it only requires one program rather than two.

As far as I know, the size of the bios shouldn't really matter as long as it matches the type of gpu you have and the memory the card has.

I can tell you that I was able to successfully flash a Connect3D X800GTO VIVO PCIe (R423 based, 2.0ns RAM) with a Powercolor X800XT BIOS. My video card has now 16 pipes and default 500 /500 MHz.
I'm still able to o/c to 540 / 540 at 76°C under load with stock cooling. At this setting I got 6.366 3D'05.

Think Ill hang onto my x800gt for the time being and watch what happens with the x1600pro ect. My board seems to do better than my review sites in that Ive had it at 580 artifact free and 595 was too in colder weather. Apparently the memory has more bandwidth than needed so its only worth clocking the GPU.